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Abstract
This paper concerns population development in the coastal districts near Stavanger County (from 1919, the County of Rogaland) in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its objective is to throw light on relationships between population patterns and the development of commerce: the search for a livelihood being a primary motivating factor in people’s choices of where to live. The study seeks to provide clear answers to questions relating to population developments in the area studied here. The collapse of spring herring fishing early in the 1870s and the crisis that struck the shipping industry in the 1880s had—both separately and together—serious consequences for population development in the areas around the Karmsund strait and Stavanger. Strong population growth came to an end. Emigration, which was sensitive to business cycles, grew substantially, bringing population growth to a virtual halt and simultaneously affecting its structure. Both internal migration and emigration from the country changed the pattern of settlement in Norway.
Public Interest Statement
Norway’s west coast in the second half of the nineteenth century: demographic consequences of the collapse of the herring and shipping industries.
Primary determiners of strong population growth, gender distribution and patterns of settlement. The influence of business cycles. Can short distance migration aid our understanding of emigration from Norway to the US? This study aims to throw light on relationships between population development and economic crises in the area around Karmsund strait and Stavanger, Norway in the 1870s and 1880s. Its main findings are: the end of strong population growth in the area coincided with a substantial rise in emigration, affecting the region’s population structure. Both internal migration and emigration changed local patterns of settlement. The study supports the thesis that the search for a secure livelihood is a primary motivating factor in people’s choices of where to live, and that “Migration is a fundamental human activity” (Daniels, Citation1991, p. 3).
Notes
1. The term “Southern district” (Søndre distrikt) was widely used as a common term for the coastal fishing grounds off the waters near Stavanger County (now Rogaland County) and Southern Bergenhus County (now Hordaland County). The main southern fishing grounds as such stretched between Skudenes and Espevær. The spring herring period of the nineteenth century lasted from 1808 until 1870.
2. Market town and staple town are granted special privileges by national authorities, the Parliament; also called formal towns. The term “urban areas” is used for the Norwegian term “tettsted”.
3. “This traffic was made possible by the liberal shipping law of 1836, which provided that farmers and others with certain experience at sea could transport loads of herring to Gothenburg.”
4. “This estimate […] assumes that birth and death rate of migrants and natives were identical. If allowance is made for migrant age structure, then migration caused about 40% of population growth and natural increase 60%.”
5. Births out of wedlock could a matter here. In general, the rate of births out of wedlock in nineteenth century Norway was low (Dyrvik, Citation1983, p. 127).
6. “Throughout Europe urban death rates regulary exceeded rural ones during most of the nineteenth century” (Page Moch, Citation2003, pp. 44–45).
7. The percentage of females in the age group 15–50 years in the entire population is partly reflected in the birth rate. With a low illegitimate birthrate, nuptiality and age distribution are also significant.
8. A precondition for surveying the structure of a population in a particular area is knowledge about gender, age and marital status.
9. “Except from smaller variations, the gender proportion [by birth] has in our country since the mid nineteenth century been 106 males to 100 females.”
10. For a summary of Europeans’ motives for emigrating to the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see Page Moch, Citation2003, pp. 149–153).
11. There were two main categories of foreigners in Norwegian industry: experts and skilled employees, who had been recruited, and immigrants in search of employment, most of the latter from Sweden (Myhre, Citation2003, pp. 237–239).
12. https://www.ssb.no/statistikkbanken/selectvarval/saveselections.asp.
http://www.ssb.no/a/kortnavn/folkendrkv/2012k4/kvart11.html.
About 85,000 foreigners (people who had neither parents nor grandparents who had been born in Norway) were registered resident in Rogaland County in 2012. These comprised roughly 19% of the county’s 450,000 inhabitants.
13. “[…] population registers for the nineteenth century confirm both the importance of migration from the immediate hinterland, or ‘demographic basin’, and high rates of population turnover that have been inferred from preindustrial records” (Lucassen & Lucassen, Citation1999, pp. 33–34).
14. “The evidence that current migrants contained a disproportionate share of young adults is overwhelming.”
15. The author has used a great deal of his own and others’ time searching for local emigration statistics for the period 1860–1890 containing information regarding gender and age from the various types of administrative units in the area studied. Unfortunately, these efforts have been fruitless.
16. “The American economic recession that began in 1873 also held back emigration from the Nordic countries for some years […]”.
17. The parish of Hjelmeland in the eastern part of Stavanger County lost 10.5% of the population in the period 1856–1860 and similar 11.5% loss of the population in the neighboring parish of Suldal between 1861 and 1865 (Solheim Pedersen, Citation1982, pp. 22–23).
18. The numbers of inhabitants for the years 1876–1880, 1881–1885 and 1886–1890 have been calculated on the basis of the censuses of 1875 and 1891.
19. The population numbers in the five year periods: 1876–1880, 1881–1885 and 1886–1890 have been calculated from the censuses of 1875, 1885 and 1891.
20. A central theme is the question of who should be considered to be an urban citizen. Discussion relating to length of residence in a town before the decision to emigrate is taken. More references can be found in Tysdal (Citation2013, note 89).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Olav Tysdal
Olav Tysdal (b. 1951) Historian. Candidatus philologiae, University of Bergen, 1990. Since 1992 assistant professor at Stavanger University College/University of Stavanger, Faculty of Arts and Education, Department of Cultural studies and languages. Bibliographical note: “The dissolution of the union between Norway and Sweden and the Scandinavian Americans,” Scandinavian Studies, Summer 2007, Vol. 79, No. 2, pp. 167–196; Sandneshistorien. Fra husklynge … til stor by [The history of Sandnes. From village … to great town], E. Hovland and G. Nerheim (Eds.), Vol. 1 (Chap. 1: “Gand,” Chap. 9: “Sandnes tar fatt” [“Sandnes get started”] and Chap. 10: “Alt eller ingenting” [“All or nothing”]), Vol. 2 (Chap. 2 “Befolkningsmagneten” [“The population magnet”] and Chap. 7: “Innvandrerbyen” [“The immigrant city”]), total 183 pp., Fagbokforlaget, Bergen, 2010; “Demografiske konsekvenser etter kollapsen i vårsildfisket i 1870” [“Demographic consequences after the spring herring industry collaps in 1870”], HEIMEN, nr. 1, 2013.